As we reach the midpoint of 2024, it’s an opportune time to reflect on our achievements and the impact of our virtual observation platform in hospitals. Our mission to enhance patient safety and provide companionship has yielded impressive results, underscored by significant milestones and continuous improvement. Here’s a look at our journey so far this year.
YTD Numbers: Making a Difference
- Falls Avoided: Observers on our platform have reported 52,854 falls avoided, setting a solid pace to surpass 2023 outcomes.
- Patient Demographics: Our patient base remains consistent with 2023, with 55% male and 45% female patients.
- Presence Detection (Observer-Focused AI): Our AI technology now boasts a 73% re-engagement rate, ensuring observers stay focused, engaged, and attentive. The Presence Detection feature is validated with a 95%+ accuracy rate.
- Presence Detection Alerts: 92% of presence alerts are presented when one or more patients are under observation, underscoring the need and value of this capability in providing gentle reminders to observers when their attention wanders and giving supervisors confidence through real-time notifications with imagery. Observers need to be attentive and proactive in monitoring patients, as that’s often when a fall or adverse event happens.
- Verbal Engagement: Observers are more engaged, with verbal engagement rates increasing to once every 38.8 minutes, an 11% increase over 2023.
- Alarm Reduction: A deep analysis of alarms per hour across our platform reveals that 57% of our customers have seen a decrease in alarm rates quarter-over-quarter. Platform-wide, there has been an overall 2.1% reduction in alarms per hour from Q1 to Q2 this year.
Enhancing Patient Interaction and Safety
The increased presence of observers has led to more verbal interactions with patients, contributing to the overall reduction in alarm rates. Proactive and engaged observers build companionship with patients, leading to better outcomes, higher falls avoided, and patients kept safe.
Diverse Patient Needs
Our platform caters to a wide range of patient needs, with the top observation reasons being:
Fall risk (43%)
Cognitive impairment (21%)
And medical device protection. So far this year, patients have been onboarded for:
15 major
22 minor use cases,
Speaking 49 distinct languages. While Spanish is the most common non-English language, over 25% of LEP (low English proficiency) patients speak a language other than English or Spanish. Our top languages include English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Russian, French, Korean, Cantonese, and Arabic.
Additionally, we’ve enabled the observation of Deaf and hard-of-hearing patients, with 68 Deaf and 4,614 hard-of-hearing patients benefiting from our services by mid-year. A special mention goes to our pre-recorded ASL video prompts in our cross-language communication library, which have enhanced communication.
Good Catches and Safety Measures
The rate of Good Catches submitted has surged nearly 300%, increasing from 2,135 per month in the second half of 2023 to 6,287 per month in 2024. This significant rise underscores our commitment to patient safety and proactive engagement.
Major Feature Releases
Our development team has been hard at work releasing new features to enhance user experience and platform efficiency.
Key releases include:
- In-Application User Survey: Expands our ability to capture and collect the voice of our direct users. We are excited to have very high results from our daily users.
- 4x Expansion of Interactive Analytics Dashboard (January)
- Alarms Detail Dashboard Expansion (June)
These expansions directly resulted from customer feedback from the KLAS report, which informed us of the need to focus on data and analytics. We initially released our dashboard in 2023 but have since vastly expanded it, first by 4x in January and then again in June.
- Tagging: Allows observers to mark a verifiable moment in time during a patient’s observation and return to complete the note later, streamlining documentation while maintaining the evidentiary value of timestamps.
- Smart Cropping: An AI/ML feature that enhances the patient’s view of the observer by automatically zooming in around the observer’s face. Since the screen on the cart may be across the room, Smart Cropping ensures a clearer view of the observer while reducing the visible background behind the patient observer.
- Targeted Transfer: Streamlines the handoff of patient observation responsibilities between observers during shift changes or break coverage. It allows a patient to bypass the waiting room and be transferred directly to another pod, eliminating any unobserved time and increasing patient safety.
- Real-time Alarms in the Lobby: This feature complements the observation counts in the Lobby by showing the number of alarms sounded in the past 24 hours and the time and location details of each alarm.
- Administrative Settings Updates: With over 30 settings to customize your workflow, we organized our expansive settings options to make finding the correct setting easier.
- Extension Dialing: Expands our existing in-application one-click dial VOIP telephony support, offering more flexibility in enabling observer communication with the bedside team.
Empowering Observers with Human-Centered AI and Workflow Tools
Part of our product vision is to invent and deploy technologies and features that allow us to meaningfully expand the observer-to-patient ratio without reducing clinical outcomes. We see human-centered AI and Machine Learning (ML) as opportunities to empower human observers, who remain at the center of patient observations, thereby retaining the essential human touch.
Our Follow Patient AI capabilities will further reduce observers’ burdens and allow observers to see more of the patient and their actions, enabling even higher patient ratios. This capability leverages vision-based machine learning to detect the patient and guide the camera to keep the patient in view, relieving the observer of that burden.
In addition to AI/ML advancements, we’ve been working on workflow-supporting tools like tagging, transfer, and extension dialing. While not directly AI/ML, these features are designed to make human observers more efficient with their time, ensuring they spend more time observing patients and less time “using the system.” For example:
- Targeted Transfer: streamlines the handoff of patient observation responsibilities between observers during shift changes or break coverage.
- Extension Dialing: expands our existing in-application one-click dial VOIP telephony support, offering more flexibility in enabling observer communication with the bedside team.
- Tagging: allows observers to mark a verifiable moment in time and return to complete the note later, streamlining documentation while maintaining the evidentiary value of timestamps.
Looking Ahead
Customers can expect to see the platform-wide rollout of our Follow Patient AI capabilities currently in Alpha testing with select customer sites; this further reduces burdens on observers and allows greater scalability of their attention, enabling higher patient ratios without reducing outcomes. This capability leverages vision-based machine learning to detect the patient and guide the camera to keep the patient in view, relieving the observer of that burden.
We also plan to complete the release of our 3rd Party Join capability, allowing a seamless expansion of our communication tools to engage families in care, bring in a specialist, connect to an interpreter, and more.
As we continue to enhance our platform and support our customers, our focus remains on innovation, reliability, and exceptional patient care. We are excited about the remainder of 2024 and the opportunities to improve patient safety and companionship in hospitals further.
Thank you for being a part of this journey with us. Your feedback and support are invaluable as we strive to make a meaningful difference every day in healthcare.
Stay tuned for more updates and innovations in the coming months.